The government's top bailout watchdog accused the Treasury Department on Monday of failing to rein in "excessive" compensation at AIG, General Motors and Ally Financial. Christy Romero, Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or SIGTARP, says that the firms don't understand "their extraordinary situations."

Investors, it turns out, you really can't trust the numbers you see in those quarterly reports: Researchers at Emory and Duke universities say that at any given time, about 20% of publicly traded firms are misrepresenting their earnings.

Profits at big U.S. companies broke records last year, and so did pay for CEOs. The head of a typical public company made $9.6 million in 2011, according to an analysis by the AP using data from Equilar, an executive pay research firm.

The average person may find it hard to imagine what big company CEOs do to justify their massive pay packages. Shareholders often ask a similar question: Why pay executives so much when the returns they produce are often so modest? But that's a question that doesn't apply to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

Ford CEO Alan Mulally and Executive Chairman Bill Ford, have been awarded $56.5 million and $42.4 million in stock, respectively, in recognition for the company's stunning turnaround, which resulted in the automaker raking in $6.6 billion last year -- its best performance in more than a decade.

Most workers would worry about losing their jobs, let alone receiving a bonus, if they slacked off, but CEOs are held to a different standard. For example, despite several stumbles, GlaxoSmithKline's CEO got a nice bonus, and Johnson & Johnson's CEO even got a raise for a job badly done.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday approved a measure that gives institutional shareholders a vote on executive pay at large corporations, part of regulators' efforts to give investors greater say over top-level salaries that have been described as excessive.

Now that General Motors is on better financial footing and the automaker's initial public offering of stock is behind it, CEO Daniel Akerson is reportedly seeking to have government restrictions on executive pay eased.

Thanks to public outcry and the prodding of the SEC, public companies don't throw crazy perks at their CEOs the way they once did. But execs still routinely get lavish benefits that increase their pay by millions. See our list of this year's most outrageous CEO perks.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has been praised for her blunt, foul-mouthed management style. But with shares of the company down more than 14% this year, her $39 million pay package is a little hard to swallow.

Considering how often airline industry executives complain about how hard it is to run a profitable carrier, one might expect their efforts could go unrewarded -- at least monetarily. Not so at the new United Continental Holdings, where big post-merger raises are coming for top management.

Citigroup Inc. (C) will pay five of its top executives almost $33 million in stock compensation this year and plans to increase its CEO's salary above his $1 a year figure in 2011, marking the financial institution's effort to reward executives for turning a profit so far this year after two years of losses.

Businesses large and small have complained for years about the cost of doing business. And it's not unusual for them to use the cost of hiring moderate-income workers to illustrate their points. Here's what they fail to mention.

Two large institutional investors are none too happy about the $50 million Occidental Petroleum's CEO made last year, so Relational Investors and CalSTRS are launching a fight to take over four of 13 seats on the oil and gas company's board.

Larry Ellison (pictured) of Oracle (ORCL) tops the Wall Street Journal's new list of the twenty-five highest-paid CEOs of the last decade. Ellison's total compensation over the last ten years, including salary, bonus, stock and stock option grants, was $1.84 billion.

A new report from pay czar Kenneth Feinberg looks at compensation practices at 17 banks that received federal bailouts, and it's not a pretty picture: The banks made an estimated $1.6 billion in "ill-advised" payments.

Winthrop Brown, a Washington lawyer who lobbies on behalf of financial services firms, says the new regulations should get fairly high marks from Wall Street -- and from Main Street. But will they prevent another economic meltdown?

It's time to change the way executives are paid to prevent another financial meltdown -- but the current reform package still lets bankers get paid up-front for closing deals while doing nothing to keep them from shifting the costs of their failed deals onto taxpayers.

Unlike other CEOs that crashed their companies and took public bailouts while wrapped in multimillion-dollar pay packages, Jim Skinner's $17 million reward is directly tied to McDonald's delivery of solid revenues and big returns for shareholders during an economic downturn.

Brian Moynihan seems keen to show the world that he's in charge of Bank of America. In his first public speech as head of the largest U.S. bank, the BofA insider says the industry is 'ready to move forward' after learning "tough lessons."